Data & Mash

When people don’t use their CRM, more often than not, people blame the training. But it’s not usually the training. Blaming a lack of training is a default answer for a more complicated problem. There are exceptions: badly configured CRM’s that are complicated to use without extensive training; companies that don’t train new staff adequately so the knowledge is lost over time due to staff turnover; but when it’s the same team that were there when the system was introduced, it’s an issue of poor change management and user buy-in.

Training is the last-but-one element of managing change in a CRM implementation.

The usual way people learn to use their new shiny CRM, is in groups, with the vendor’s trainer presenting a system to them on a big screen. Sometimes, the users have laptops so they can do some things for themselves and join in more.

This training session is an essential part of a CRM deployment but it should be kept short – half a day or a full day at most. People will not use a CRM, just because they know how to. Yes, it’s odd but true.

There are three types of user:
Group 1: You’ve logged in, shown them a contact and an opportunity and they’re off – streets ahead of you already and you just need to ensure they focus and concentrate on the business rules. These are not intuitive but essential to getting everyone using the system in the same way.

Group 2: The majority: They’ll get there and are comfortable with technology to some degree, but they won’t instinctively understand the software and how it works so you will need to show them.

Group 3: They struggle with new technology, but most of all, they find change extremely hard.

Know your groups and work with them in the right way.

For all groups – do the basic vendor training, en masse. Then get Group 1 using the system first, get them to super user status and get their bosses and them to agree, part of their job will now be helping others. That’s important. You need your super users and you need them to feel appreciated for helping others. If their boss is glaring at them while they neglect their main job to help others learn, they won’t want to help.

Groups 2 and 3 then need drip-feed training and one-to-one access to help. For the first week, if possible, have someone sitting with the users ready to answer the endless stream of questions and who can go and sit with people to do specific tasks. Group 2 will know when they need it, but you’ll have to insist on spending time with Group 3. Request sessions to sit with them, listen to their complaints, be sympathetic and focus them on how the system will solve their problems. They are struggling with change, as much as with the technology, work on that and it should get easier.

Over the coming weeks reduce the visits to 2-3 times per week and keep an eye on everyone’s adoption levels. Don’t let Group 3 hide, keep sitting with them and use a bit of stick with the carrot if you need to.

When you’re satisfied the system is bedding in, set up user group meetings e.g. every quarter. These should be structured forums where the team learn tips, address functionality issues and own the system. Use this for change request management (developments to the CRM software) and keep these sessions going.

Hopefully then, you’ll have high user adoption and not have to hear complaints that your company didn’t spend enough money on training because you brought about change instead.

Posted in CRM, data management, IT Strategy
Tags: CRM, CRM deployment, CRM implementations

We’ve just gone public with our new – more affordable and more automated – Compare CRM service. Driven by our passion in helping people choose the right CRM for their business, we’ve been on a bit of a mission to bring affordable CRM selection advice to small and mid-sized businesses who don’t need or can’t afford our consulting services.

To do this we’ve demo’d over 150 CRM and related solutions. We’ve worked hard to refine the questions that we need to ask you, the buyer of CRM. We’ve used our experience of CRM consulting to pin down the most important criteria against which we test the CRM solutions themselves. And we’ve found a way to get to the core of your business needs in an efficient and cost-effective way. The result is the Compare CRM service and at just £245 + VAT, we think it’s an excellent price for a great big hit of expertise. The time people save Googling solutions alone, will make it worthwhile. If you consider it’s taken us 6 months to get to this point… you can see how much research we’ve done, so you don’t have to.

The price is purposefully low so that businesses of all sizes can get good and affordable CRM advice.

The web is littered with CRM comparison services which are superficially helping you choose CRM but actually lead generation services for the vendors themselves. How else do those sites make their money? Don’t get me wrong, we’re all for free information but we wanted to do something different – match you, the user, to the CRM you need and to stay independent and honest about the systems we review. We therefore ask you to be the people that pay us, so we can remain vendor independent and on your side.

We hope you’ll use the service, spread the word and let people know that they don’t need to guess or rely on Googling. They just need to go to www.comparecrmreport.com and they’ll be in safe hands. Everyone who’s used the service so far say it’s great, “we know our stuff”, “there’s a great need for a service like this” and that we cut through the noise of white papers and review sites and all those free lead generation services. Now you can use the service too and we hope you do.

www.comparecrmreport.com

Posted in CRM, sales automation, sales contact management, social crm, Uncategorized
Tags: Choosing CRM, Compare CRM, CRM, CRM Tips

When you are creating requirements documentation for CRM and related software, you must talk to and involve the end users and understand their requirements. It’s necessary and it seems to me it’s both common sense and basic courtesy to do so. It’s surprising how often this isn’t done.

It’s important for user acceptance; to get a system that does what users need it to do; and to make people aware that the way they work is going to change so they start to prepare themselves.

But once you’re sitting down and talking to people about what they need, there is an art to interpreting their needs and turning those into a workable useable system.

Finding business analysts who can interpret rather than just document user requirements, is quite challenging. Users tend to describe solutions rather than problems when they define their requirements. They tend to describe how they imagine the screen will look, and ask for a tick box or drop down, to store information. Bad business analysis is just capturing this information verbatim and letting the solution provider add the requested tick box or drop-down to the CRM. When you start to add a lot of these, the cost of configuring goes up and the need to create special reports based on user-added fields, adds more work and the costs increase further. It’s a vicious cycle you want to avoid.

Good business requirements gathering will be a conversation between the analyst and the user… “Why do you want that field, what action will be taken based on that field?” and to talk round the problem. Often what they are trying to achieve, can be achieved from the out-of-the box solution. Aiming to avoid configuring brings three benefits:

- Firstly, it keeps configuring levels down which reduce costs. The costs are lower in the short term as it simplifies the implementation and in the long term because lots of configuration means any further changes need to be done by people who know the implications for future changes on the original configuration.

- Secondly, it keeps your configuration more closely aligned to the software’s inherent design. Many CRM’s have good, robust and logical process built in. When you mess with that, you mess with the software itself and the opportunity to improve process, and streamline it is lost. Usually a business must configure their CRM to some degree, but seeking to minimise this will pay off in lots of ways later and will, paradoxically, often give you more efficient processes in the end.

- And lastly, you’ll reduce your data entry burden. The less you expect people to type in information, check boxes and so on, the more likely they are to use it. Deriving information from fields that already exist is far better where it is possible. It is far easier to add a field in CRM than it is to get people to populate it. Only add those that will make a significant difference to your sales and marketing results.

This ability to interpret user requirements and still deliver the system they need, is one of the keys to CRM success. In our experience, being qualified as a business analyst or having many CRM implementations under your belt, does not demonstrate that you can do this well. You need to know sales and marketing well, be able to talk to them in their language and you need to have technical empathy and match problems to solutions. It’s a great skill and we meet both marketers and techies that have it, but not that often. However these are the people you want running your projects.

Posted in CRM, data management, IT Strategy
Tags: business analysis, business analyst, business requirements, CRM, CRM implementations, CRM Tips, user requirements

A year ago, our Head of Marketing Intelligence (James Dodd) and I were discussing where we could store our growing database of sales and marketing software – which changes and shifts constantly as we add to it and update it.

It’s been a constant challenge for our business because we need to easily and efficiently take a requirements document from a client or other consultant/consulting firm, match it against appropriate solutions from our database and advise them which software is best for their needs. Ultimately, we want people to be able to do that for themselves, using the “internet”.

We are a young company, so doing this cost-effectively was crucial. Especially because we had yet to prove the concept that a customer would want to interact directly with our database of software and would pay us to do so.

We reviewed our options…Dabble, Zoho, WordPress, our website software, survey tools, late-night coding by James who thinks writing things in C++ is a leisure pursuit, various open source tools and many more. During these searches we pondered…who are these people who make these lovely useful pieces of software and then give them away from free?

James pondered a while and then declared… “Hippies”. So thank you to the hippies who have made it possible for us to get this far and who will probably be helping us for a long time still.

Posted in data management, marketing databases
Tags: Dabble, hippies, Sales marketing software, Wordpress, Zoho

As we go about our business, advising on CRM and other sales and marketing technology we hit a common challenge. People have objectives for their CRM implementation which fundamentally, a CRM system will not deliver. We (at Mayfield Solutions) do use the term CRM in its narrowest sense – a piece of software with a database attached (see our definitions).

So we often start projects, debunking myths about what a CRM solution will deliver in a business. Typically people turn to a CRM solution to solve these problems and are disappointed if it is not able:

1. To make teams work better together and cooperate more
That is a process and people problem and needs addressing before you implement a CRM solution. A CRM will support good team work and cooperation but it will not create it.

2. To improve data quality
It’s a cliché to say “rubbish in rubbish” out but it takes diligence, consistency of approach and usually time and money, to maintain your data and keep it accurate and recent, CRM’s on their own will not do this. If you want improved data quality there are many steps that you need to take that do not need a CRM, their are some that will be supported by a CRM but a CRM on its own is not a solution to data quality problems. Furthermore, most CRM solutions (as per our definitions) have quite weak data processing functionality. Marketing databases and other solutions are much more sophisticated than CRM.

3. To increase revenues
Now…this one is a bit more tricky. If you are not using a CRM and have an active sales programme, it is very likely using a CRM will increase your revenues. This is because it should, increase sales-team productivity, reduce the number of leads that fall between the cracks, improve visibility on sales performance and enable managers to improve their sales teams skills, justify investment in more sales people where appropriate, spot weak performers and provide a more coherent communication approach for prospects and customers where sales people can speak for each other in cases of absence. It will only do this if you have a product and market that is capable of delivering more revenue to your business, the CRM is implemented well and supported by management and the team using it.

4. To improve our direct marketing
CRM’s grew out of sales systems and then marketing was added later. Originally the marketing modules were hopeless for direct marketing. They are better now but still, if direct marketing is your reason for looking at CRM, think again. (With one qualifier, the term CRM has been adopted by other software which we would classify as marketing database or other types of software).

5. To find efficiencies and save money
CRM can bring efficiencies and cost-savings to your business but if this is your only objective, there are probably other ways to achieve those goals. CRM is really about increasing revenues, improving your business and increasing retention.

If that’s what CRM is not, then what is CRM for?

In our view, all sales teams should use CRM or sales automation for the sake of the business (risk protection, continuity, management information) and for the sake of the sales people (so you can sell more and manage your time better).

In some businesses a pre-integrated sales and marketing software solution is appropriate and CRM is good for that because integration of separate systems is complex and can be expensive and if a CRM does everything you need for sales and marketing, that’s great.

Sales and customer services should often work from the same database so that they can provide a seamless and professional response to customers. If the CRM does what both teams need, then CRM is great for this.

And remembers, all the above things can and should be addressed in other ways and may form part of a CRM implementation. Some of them can be solved using great technology and the right software, but it might not be CRM that you need.

Posted in CRM, data management, sales automation
Tags: CRM, marketing databases, what is CRM?

1. Don’t be so foolish as to think a top 10 list of CRM implementation tips will see you straight.

2-9. Refer to tip no. 1.

The web is full of tips, hints, free advice and white papers on CRM. Sure, it will educate you but don’t you have something better to do?

If you need to do your accounts, you get an accountant, if you need to sell more, you hire a sales person. Businesses shouldn’t underestimate what is involved in implementing new sales and marketing technology and with a bit of planning and commitment, great things can be achieved. But if you think it’s a task you can squeeze in between sending out campaigns and attending meetings, you will get a nasty surprise.

We are constantly irritated by messages that say CRM is essential to businesses (it’s not) and that it can deliver amazing things (it rarely does). But it has it’s place and if the problems you have suggest a CRM solution or other related technology would be useful, then it’s worth doing it and doing it properly. And then the return will justify the investment.

Posted in CRM, IT Strategy, sales automation, sales contact management, sales management software
Tags: CRM Tips, Successful CRM, Top 10 CRM Tips

Unfortunately and fortunately, there’s all sorts of new technology available for sales and marketers.

It’s unfortunate, because many people still don’t have the basics in place,  sales management tools, marketing databases and campaign management tools and you may even be using Outlook to send out your email marketing messages. And now there’s a whole new set of kit to investigate and buy and use, if you want to keep ahead of the competition.

But it’s fortunate, because it’s much much better than the old CRMs. It’s cheaper to do the basics. It’s faster to deploy. It’s easier to learn how to use it. It’s all really good …really. But there are more types of system doing more things and the environment you are marketing in, is more complicated too.

So when planning your use of technology you need to be thinking about how you communicate outwards and how your customers and prospects can communicate with you. Then plan your technology around managing that as best you can, as it’s getting quite complicated.

Consider all the ways that people can communicate with you – whether it’s ordering or just showing interest:

1. Emails:

Direct one-to-one emails to people in your organisation
Click throughs and opens
Unsubscribing (yes, that’s a communication even if it’s unwanted)

2. Your Web

Interacting with your website
Lingering, leaving, repeatedly visiting key pages and products

3.  The WorldWide Web

Talking about you
Talking to you on forums and other social sites
Ignoring you
Watching you and following you
Recommending you
Passing on links

3. Mail

Opening your post
Throwing it away
Giving it to someone else
Keeping it for later
Responding to it
Going online and interacting that way

4. Telephone

Calling you
Being called by you

5. Face to face

Events
Sales Meetings
Social interactions with your staff

So, the point is, how can you marshal all these interactions, understand them and make good commercial use out of them?

Well, there’s not a single answer. But I do know it’s hard. It’ll be an ongoing, iterative process. And I do know, technology is going to be essential. And in fact, it already is.

To start your planning, draw a simple diagram of your main sources of data (analytics, email marketing, databases, sales systems/CRM, fulfilment/accounting systems) and a short summary of what information they hold that you care about for doing sales and marketing.

And now you have the beginnings of what you need to know to integrate systems for customer and campaign management processes.

You’re probably beginning to think you might need some help…. It’s not simple, but it does need to be done.

(And yes, I mean get us to help. We spend all our time working out how to tackle these issues in a structured way, that provides you with a technology road map to get you where you want to be, so you can focus on selling and marketing like you’re supposed to).

Posted in CRM, sales contact management, marketing databases, marketing software, sales management software, IT Strategy, social crm, data management, sales automation, marketing automation
Tags: IT Strategy, Integrating CRM, Marketing Technology, Marketing Operations